Posts tagged:#Queerness

Ali Smith’s novel There but for the tells the story of a man who, in the middle of a dinner party, locks himself in the spare room. The story unfolds over the course of the following year or so through the perspectives of four different characters whose lives the man, Miles, has touched in small ways. The characters whose voices comprise the story are Anna, an unemployed Scottish woman; Mark, a middle-aged gay man; May, an elderly woman with dementia; and Brooke, a 10-year-old Black girl. In each of their narrative turns, these characters reflect on experiences in their lives and how others perceive and react to them, giving the reader a rich and textured composite image of what human life can be in and around Greenwich, London in 2009-10. Smith’s novel marries realism and surrealism, satire and earnestness, and weaves it all together with wit and wordplay to create a compelling story of what it feels like to live in the political moment of the Recession.

Often, the contemporary eye looks at Shakespeare’s plots and characters with a certain skepticism. No matter how timeless and universal the themes – the joy, the anguish, the love – we cannot help but wonder: how could a mother not recognise her own twins? Do those simple disguises really trick everyone? And perhaps most persistently for me, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, what’s up with all these women? Under the auspices of the patriarchal system in early modern England, female Shakespearean characters are often submissive, with few admirable exceptions: the Princess in Love’s Labours Lost and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing come to mind. Ultimately however, Kate in Taming of the Shrew and others like her, leave modern women shaking their heads.

Any author of fiction – and Shakespeare is no exception – asks an audience to momentarily suspend disbelief. In novels, films, and plays, ghosts walk, witches prophesize, and statues come alive. But still, that final question persists: what is up with all these women? In Nothing of Woman in Me, which debuted in February 2018 at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford Upon Avon, and will be reprised in July at the RSC Dell, director and playwright Juliano Zaffino attempts to answer this question. Zaffino earned his MA in Shakespeare and Theatre from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford Upon Avon, and will pursue his PhD there next year. As a gay man, he has first-hand experience of belonging to a marginalised group in society. By exploring the psyches of some of Shakespeare’s most complex and thought-provoking female characters, Zaffino hoped to give expression to all silenced populations by “capturing the voice of women throughout history and in our modern day, and unifying these voices through the vehicles of Shakespeare’s voiceless women.”[1] He “brought his experience to the table: my life as a gay man, the women who had raised me and whom I had grown up with, the reading and watching and listening I had done.” The dawning of the #MeToo era has offered a relevant and powerful backdrop for his work, having finally provided the opportunity for many muted female voices to whisper, speak, and shout above decades of oppressive abuse. No longer willing to suffer in silence as if that were the norm, women from professional, political, academic, and personal backgrounds are setting each other free by telling their truths. Women in Shakespeare’s time could not do that: but Zaffino imagines what it might have been like if they could have.

Could you start by describing your career? What do you do, and what have you written?

I wrote a novel called Harmless Like You about a Japanese artist living in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. She ends up abandoning her son. It’s about how and why that happens. Oh, and there’s a bald cat, if you’re a fan of bald cats.

I’m also the editor of an anthology called Go Home!, which is a collaboration with the Feminist Press and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. It’s a collection of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction about home by writers who identify as Asian or Asian-American.

‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change’. – Audre Lorde (‘The Master’s Tools’ 19)

My four years at university have led me to a simple conclusion: universities are bastions of white supremacy. From my first-year at university, it was clear that I would not belong in the proverbial ‘Master’s House’ (Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools’ 19). It was micro-aggressions by students and academics alike. It was ignorant comments about the ‘Third World’ and the backward people living in it. It was learning everything from a Eurocentric and Western point of view and as postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty explains, Europe was the silent referent in everything I was taught (42). The imbalance of power was clear by the content of what I was taught and by the language used to teach. Throughout my first two years at university, I struggled to find language to express how I felt and was deprived of any courses that discussed people of colour. In my second-year, I remember an ill-conceived course simply called ‘Asia and Africa 2a: Societies, Cultures, and Empires, c.1600-1880’ and ‘Asia and Africa 2b: Nationalisms, Liberation Movements and the Legacies of Colonialism, c. 1880-Present Day’. As you can imagine, the course lacked nuance and was far too vague to offer any real insight into either ‘Asia’ or ‘Africa’.

Could you start by explaining what Queering the Map does – and why you think it’s important?

Queering the Map is a community-generated mapping project, which geo-locates queer memories, histories, and experiences in relation to physical space using an online platform. Part of the idea is to open up the question of what constitutes queer space, or even more basically, what constitutes queerness. So, it’s a very open call in terms of submissions: whatever counts for the person submitting counts to the project and the process of queering space.

In the context of queer theory, there’s value in trying to unsettle what queer identity means. Queering the Map offers the opportunity for people to define what queerness means for them on their own terms, adding nuance to this term which can be endlessly changed and expanded – moving beyond a singular understanding of queerness, towards a collective understanding.

Horror cinema is a genre that, with its subversive and confrontational intentions, is arguably ripe for queer filmmaking: yet as a queer horror fan it is rare I find myself represented on screen. In many horror films, academic readings of character’s queerness are often reduced to subtext. While queer characters are admittedly not totally absent from horror cinema, their sexuality often forms the basis of the horror itself. Depictions of canonically queer characters tend to form two extremes: ironically mannered villainy or predatory perversity. A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) became a cult film with queer audiences due to its fairly explicit homoeroticism, including a high-camp portrayal of leather-clad ‘daddies’ in a gay bar. More recently, however, queer representation has shifted markedly. While visibility of queer communities within mass media increased at the turn of the century, the subsequent backlash from religious and conservative groups reignited the spectre of the sex-crazed, corrupting queer figure that first originated during the AIDS epidemic (Bronski, 99). Several New French Extremist horror films, such as Haute Tension (2003) and Irreversible (2002) exploited this undercurrent of fear, featuring characters whose same-sex desire is voracious and violent to the point of explicit homophobia.

Recently, I turned in a fiction portfolio for a creative writing course: a queer retelling of a young adult novel. My professor said that, when she heard about my topic, she’d immediately envisioned a story about AIDS. How relieved she was, she said, that it was not, in fact, about that epidemic. Then I turned in an excerpt of a queer-themed* children’s book to a writers’ group. My feedback questioned the very need for diverse books, implying that queer themes are too mature for children to understand. I was unsure how to respond in either situation, never having encountered someone who so blatantly dismissed the value of inclusive literature or expected a queer story to centre on AIDS. Why did they have those views or expectations? Perhaps the answer has to do with misunderstanding queer themes in children’s literature.

The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis, first published in French in 2014, is one of the most successful pieces of Francophone writing in modern times: translated into twenty languages, it has taken the European literary establishment by storm. The novel details the life of a child in Northern France, a boy whose story echoes his author’s, with all his hints of wit, his budding charms – and, crushingly, his overwhelming suffering. This is a text about a young man’s pain, as an effeminate homosexual in a social world that reviles him.

We celebrated Project Myopia with a beautiful launch event towards the end of semester 2. It was a night of music and poetry, as well as an opportunity for some of our contributors to elaborate on their essays and ideas. Our performers touched on a wide range of serious issues: from the exclusion of racial minorities’ contribution to the canon of literature, to the oppressive nature of zero-hour contracts that prevent tutors from being able to fully engage in helping all students get ahead, let alone those from a minority background who need assistance most. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who performed and shared their experiences, and we also have to thank everyone who attended and helped us drink the wine we provided! Project Myopia aims to bring marginalized people together and amplify their voices, and our launch felt like a perfect culmination of our semester’s work: people came together and shared their experiences of an academic world we need to change.

“Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home” (Feinberg, 19XX, pg. 11).

Leslie Feinberg’s words echo in my head. I think about how strange yet familiar the feeling is of finding a work of fiction that you relate to on such a deep and personal level. I’m a trans man and I first started transitioning two years ago, in which time I’ve searched libraries, websites, lists upon lists of queer authors and gender theorists, all in the search for an answer to a question I can’t quite put into words. I wanted to find an account of someone who felt like I did. When you’re straight and cisgender, your sexuality and gender are never called into question by the literature surrounding you, but when you’re trans or queer, your identity becomes academic. Something to be debated around a table of people who don’t identify as you do. As a friend put it: “Cis people have gender, trans people have gender identities.”